The Post Fordist Social Machine

How post Fordism explains contemporary media, not vice versa.


Commercial television is just a staging post on the way to the real, joined-up, post Fordist communication machine, on the way to the 'infobahn' (the information super-highway) where all the functions anticipated from control over the information flow will find their true technological realisation. If one doesn't understand this one risks saying a lot of stupid things about the media and about the power of information. Certainly the media play a fundamental role in the matter but they are part of an entirely different series of links. In this new series of links we don't see the same television we used to see, we don't live the same set of media we used to live. It is the post Fordist social machine that explains the nature of the media, not vice versa.

(Maurizio Lazzarato: Lavoro immateriale, 1997)

Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo II

The role of John Prescott represents a strange little footnote to Ms Harman's kangaroo court.

Prescott, for the record, is a sort of English Berlusconi; similarly amoral. Where the latter (was it Rosanna Rosanda who actually made this observation?) embodies a certain male Italian self perception as gaffe prone and inept (see the considerable Italian literature on ineptitude) but also oddly successful, so Prescott for New Labour has been its inarticulate, supposedly 'working class' soul: a buffoon who is also wheedling, stupid and aggressive, insufficiently despised. And successful.

Now Prescott has started a blog. A 15 March entry refers to an interview with the BBC:
'They called because they read this blog. It's remarkable how by being your own publisher you can get your thoughts out there unedited and have the mainstream media follow you.'

They called, of course, because Prescott has some status and because of his tireless self promotion. And his blog is a form of viral marketing designed to sell New Labour as a product, a label, as he knows but does not say.

Part of that viral marketing has been to give Ms Harman's Court of Public Opinion some small semblance of flesh. Hence Mr Prescott's bogus 'petition' against poor Fred Goodwin's pension, which a vast army of 3,710 New Labour sympathisers have been induced to sign in the run up to red rose day: Multitude 2.0, as it were.

Privatising Despair

In Imaginary Insurrections I tried to show how Gordon Brown co-opted the idea of insurrection into the rhetoric of New Labour during his Washington speech, how he tamed it: first by putting it into the past (the insurrectionary thought which preceded what's since been achieved); then by making the crowd, the opposition, the insurrectionary multitude part of the ruling, undemocratic elite which is what New Labour actually is (22% of the voting population as of 2005; though now it is probably worse).

In Ms Harman's Tame Kangaroo I tried to highlight a closely related trick, to show how Ms Harman pointedly conflated the coercive violence of the lynch mob with conventional models of legality to produce what she called 'the Court of Public Opinion' in a piece of rhetoric which showed up disturbingly (as the assault on Civil Liberties also does) New Labour's quasi fascist inclinations.

Not that there is anything very new in this technique: New Labour has employed it from the beginning. Before his translation to Cardinal Blair of Baghdad, for example, Bishop Tony used quite regularly to jump the barrier between, say, the providers of a central service (for which he was broadly responsible) and those who found themselves victims of its delivery, co-opting their complaints.

And now, in New Labour's plans, announced by Alan Johnson and James Purnell, that the unemployed should all be offered counselling, preferably CBT, the managerial version of the 'talking cures', we have the latest policy counterpart of that same principle.

In 1936, 200 people marched from Jarrow to Westminster to protest against unemployment; not an insurrection, to be sure, though it was something.

In 1981 Norman Tebbit mischievously rewrote that episode to attack the riots then taking place in Handsworth and in Brixton. A good example of the jam tomorrow version of reality upon which capitalism relies:

'I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.'

Unsurprisingly, what New Labour now propose, at a cost of £13m in freshly invented money, is no more helpful than Mr Tebbit's plucky memorial and very much more despairing even as rhetoric: not merely the diversion of political anger into sturdiness and self help along the lines of Samuel Smiles but actually the full privatisation of social discontent through its elimination from the social and collective (ie political) sphere and its extrusion into the private, the personal and the 'mental'.

Should there be mass unemployment and consequential anger and despair, in other words, and this seems by no means unlikely, then the fault will lie not with the depredations wrought by neoliberalism, of which New Labour is a part. Rather it will have come about through individual failures to perceive exactly how half full the glass is. And should there be a solution in New Labour's terms then this will come about not through the emergence of some new social subject already present in potential, through the ballot box or across the barricades, but simply through getting used to how things are.

Which is a gloss on political impotence, of course: the dissipation of political energy and endeavour and how they come about into the 'symptoms' of 'disturbed' individuals.

Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo

Ms Harman invokes the lynch mob.


Bacon's 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice' (Essays IV) introduces several propositions:

'[T]he more man's nature runs to [revenge], the more ought law to weed it out: for as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law, but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office.'

Towards the end of the essay he draws a further distinction:

'Public revenges are for the most part fortunate [...] But in private revenges it is not so...'

Because 'justice' in its untamed state is private, plural, interpersonal and damaging to the Law as an institution, private revenge is inimical to the latter in a more systemic way than, say, the breaking of some individual prohibition. So revenge is like dry rot, ground elder or a virus. As part of any civilising project it needs to be done away with or, at the very least, controlled even as the tarmac is being laid down over the chaos.

Hobbes similarly insists on keeping separate the plurality of the multitude in its natural state, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unity of the people civilly instantiated in (not just represented by) whatever 'public' institutions are in place:

'[M]en distinguish not enough between a People and a Multitude. The People is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a Multitude. [...] In a Democracy, and Aristocracy, the Citizens are the Multitude, but the Court is the People. And in a Monarchy, the Subjects are the Multitude, and (however it seem a Paradox) the King is the People.'
(De Cive, XII 8)

And here by contrast is the 'little and narrow mind' of the ineffably stupid Ms Harman, New Labour's deputy leader, as revealed to Andrew Marr, acceding to the exceedingly 'weak pleasure' of threatening poor Mr Goodwin's pension with a lynch mob:

'The Prime Minister has said [Mr Goodwin's pension] is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted. It might be enforceable in a Court of Law but it is not enforceable in the Court of Public Opinion and that's where the Government steps in.'

What's underway here, as with Brown's imaginary insurrection, is an attempt to tame the wild, to turn it into a colony. Her comments mimic a parental turn of phrase: 'No, because I said no.' However, whereas parental authority is quite clear (as far as stroppy toddlers are concerned the parent makes the Law) Ms Harman's version moves about, shifting and evading responsibility, blame and anything else that might be awkward at some point.

First the Prime Minister is reported as having said something in a very performative sense, as though he were a Ruler making Law. But he's not. Or at least not by himself. So it's actually just an opinion. Therefore the authority (such as it is) is not legal or even deontic but doxastic.

Next Ms Harman denatures the Law, splitting legal accountability into 'a Court of Law' and 'the Court of Public Opinion'. But the latter doesn't exist and the former is already, in Hobbes' sense, the People. In which case to go beyond that bold embodiment into something new involving what Ms Harman calls the 'public' but by which she really means the mob is to invite insurrection or what Hobbes calls 'sedition', ie the overthrow of civil governance by 'the multitude'. Whilst to suggest as well, as she does, a connection between such a court and government is to invoke either a People's Court such as might follow a popular revolution or, disturbingly, the Volksgerichtshof of Adolf Hitler.

But of course Ms Harman steers well clear of all that. Her Court will have no claws, not even theoretical teeth, despite what she implies. So Mr Goodwin's right to take his booty will indeed be 'not enforceable' before her kangaroo court, which is hardly much of a threat. And he will take it anyway. People won't much like that but they'll live, and HMG will share their pain. They may fail to take to the streets. However, that will be no victory for any sound good sense. Rather it will be the memory of an almost fascist urge to victimise and punish, albeit not followed through. At least on this occasion.

Here to close is Mandeville's Grumbling Hide in which the lawlessness of the multitude is incorporated into the polity itself as though it were the grit within the pearl within the oyster:

Virtue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a thousand Cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The Worst of all the Multitude
Did Something for the common Good.

Presumably in his prelapsarian pomp, which is why he was given his knighthood in the first place, Mr Goodwin was just such a piece of grit. Or at least he was thus regarded. By a venal and dangerous government which at that stage believed in what it now disowns.

Imaginary Insurrections

Gordon Brown’s ‘insurrection in the human imagination’ is an imaginary one.


Gordon Brown told the US Congress that throughout its history 'America', by which he meant the US, had 'led insurrections in the human imagination', whatever that might imply. What he presumably meant was that it had made 'imaginative leaps', reminded others that their reach could exceed their grasp; some platitude of that order. Or perhaps, since Obama himself ('nothing's impossible I have found') had confected 'pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America' using lyrics from a convenient popular song, just 'to dream the impossible dream'. (Leigh & Darion, from Man of La Mancha, where it's sung by Don Quixote.)

What Brown is highly unlikely to have meant was that insurrections were jolly good things. Instead of some rebellious version of the future ('Let us together curb the power of the US,' 'Let's storm the Winter Palace,' 'Tear down that flag' and so forth, or Bisca's throwaway 'I don't know if another world is possible, but this one is impossible') in which what will happen is unknown, what he actually sought to put across was just the usual, victor's version of the past turning into the present in which the known and comfortable apex of the present is supported and justified by an earlier courage and by the rhetorical preposition of future unknownness into what's modally past. In other words, it was no doubt all just flattery intended for a US President who had already said, at the Eastern Inaugural Ball, 'Today was your day. Today was a day that represented all your efforts, all your faith, all your confidence in what's possible in America. They said it couldn't be done. And you did it. And if we apply that not just to elections, but to jobs, to how we rebuild our communities, then when people tell you we can't employ folks, [that] you are out of work, you say - ?' To which the crowd had responded predictably, using the words of Bob the Builder, 'Yes we can!' like so many Annie Oakleys. The point of course was not that he 'did it' or would do it but that he'd won. He did it better than Mr McCain.

And yet 'insurrections' was a very nice touch indeed. Besides evoking indirectly but deliberately the US American revolution, Brown was hinting at some sort of popular movement independent of rationality, coming from beneath. (The US Declaration of Independence, as it happens, invokes a 'natural law'. Within its first few sentences it arrogates apodictic truths that were meant to come from above, in line with Hobbes' definitions of sedition. And maybe it even carries the memory of a crowd swarming beyond the confines in which they were contained.)

Back in 2004, Brown quoted Roger Scruton (England: an Elegy) wistfully evoking British 'national character' (actually 'English' character, though Brown doesn't mention this) as something transcendent or external which exceeds 'the crowd' and which Brown called 'a golden thread': 'When people discard, ignore or mock the ideals that formed our national character then they no longer exist as a people but only as a crowd.' In other words, according to Brown and/or Scruton, there is something mereologically bigger that contains us and which we really ought to respect.

But insurrection finds its origin with that 'crowd', with overflowing, with breaking out of containment and not at all with something that falls within the purview of (let's say) English Heritage. So by saying what he did when he did in Washington, what Brown was expressing was real abjection, albeit in a patronising way: 'I tip my hat to the new generation' (The Who, in Won't Get Fooled Again); the crowd that comes from below and overwhelms me, overtakes me and reforms itself into a 'people' has been a process of becoming a new sort of public to which I am subject but to which I do not belong. Although I could not have been that crowd nor am I now that public I still carry the idea of the crowd within me as a keepsake, a sort of memory. I find it soothing when I put my feet up in the evenings.

It isn't insurrection of the imagination or by the imagination that's being evoked, in other words, but merely an imaginary insurrection ('I could have been a contender'), a sense of what might have been. Or insurrection tamed and trapped like a snowstorm inside another glass paperweight on this Prime Minister's desk.

Taking Back Subjectivity

Operaismo, subjectivity and Marx's 'general intellect'.

'The problem is that operaismo needs to liberate the forces that have been chilled and frozen by the cognitive sciences just as, in a former age, it liberated the forces seized by neocapitalist and technicist ideologies. This is the problem if one means to have the general intellect as a subject.'
(Paolo Virno, from Gli operaisti)

Self Defence

Two versions of vision and hearing.

God has defended his poor ones. You want them silenced and God has made you blind.
(Lettera ad una professoressa)

It's not true that we are helpless faced with images. It's images that are helpless faced with their own sound track. It's hearing that will save us.
(Tiziano Scarpa: Kamikaze d'occidente)